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>> Have you considered a port of eLua onto Raspberry Pi and/or Beaglebone Black? Of course, Lua can easily be installed on these under Linux, but I mean running "bare metal" without an OS. So it would just be a route to getting a low-cost target board with plenty of RAM. The "microcontroller +SDRAM" boards all seem to be very poor value compared to these little Linuxboards.
The Pi is so cheap because of economies of scale: two million produced so far, mostly in China.
FWIW I'm currently running a datalogging application on a Raspberry Pi, using an ADC board. I wrote it in C because that's fast and close to the hardware, and the appropriate libraries and demo code were available. It runs under Raspbian Linux (using cron, sudo, and negative nice-ness), logging the time and a single 12-bit value every 4 milliseconds. This generates 500 megabytes of log files a day. I siphon the files off to a PC daily via the network, to avoid the 8GB flash card running out of storage.
BTW, Lua 5.2 seems to run nicely on the Pi. :-)The main disadvantage of the Pi is that it uses an HDLC monitor, which costs a lot more than the Pi itself. Personally I think this was a bad design choice; there must be a lot of old VGA monitors around. Apart from this I'm very happy with the Pi and would recommend it for anyone who needs a cheap Linux box.
The Pi's Rasbian Linux distro is quite extensive, but it should be possible to prune it back to a minimalist Linux kernel plus C compiler etc., to form a specialised Lua machine.
David